Job Complexity and Difficulty

[CidHeiral]

For the most part I agree with OP. Even if the encounter design is awesome you're only progging any given fight a small percentage of the time, so if the jobs are all boring you're going to be bored the other 95% of the time. If the jobs are engaging then you'll be having fun more often than not since even if the content itself isn't that interesting you'll still be mentally engaged with playing your job correctly.

I'd really love to see complexity back with the jobs, where the job kits are fun and engaging with lots of decision making and interplay within the kit. That's also why I hope the devs stay faaaaaar away from talent trees. lol

[Mawlzy]

As someone who is bad at PvE, I find the encounter design to be very puzzling, particularly in DT.

I have over 2 hotbars of buttons. Why? I mostly use W, S and mouse because I'm trying not to die. I imagine those of you who are good at PvE use more buttons in a set sequence, over and over and over again. Is this interesting to you? I like playing piano occasionally, but in that instance the result is a pleasing sound.

With fight design that boils down to "inflict damage, move somewhere to avoid damage/soak/couple/clap like a seal" you don't need all these buttons, particularly when you're struggling to find the good spot on the floor. The fight would be no more nor less interesting if all you had was one damage button along with W, S and mouse.

Contrast this with PvP. I use all my buttons! I am in constant motion. Every encounter is different. Sometimes I use my buttons in a different order because of the nature of the engagement and am correct to do so. I enjoy PvP and am quite good at it.

Why can't PvE be more like PvP?

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

...Huh, I can't say I ever considered NIN and RDM to be hard to play compared to say...

I guess part of the reason (at least for RDM) is because their difficulty & complexity has not changed by much since their inception whereas the rest of the roster (SMN & BLM) all got bonked by the simplification hammers over and over. Do that enough times, you may even reach to the point where two latter becomes easier than RDM.

It kinda makes me wonder if the reason they change those two were because of the “This is too complex pls make it easier”-complaints whereas jobs like RDM & WHM barely gets anything because then they get ”Well they’re the ‘easy’ jobs so they should not need much.”-perception.

[Aravell]

Why can't PvE be more like PvP?

I think the main difference is that the objective set out by the developers in PvE content is for you to (eventually) win, while that's not the case in PvP.

Because of that, PvE encounters are set to follow a strict script that the players can solve and get their win after, contrasting with that, you cannot "solve" PvP because it involves multiple unpredictable people in the field at once. So PvE encounters are only an interaction between your job kit and the script that the boss follows, whether your buttons are useful or not depends on the script, that's why PvE feels like you can clear it just fine with just movement keys and one attack button. On the other side, PvP can actually give you just 5 buttons and be very engaging because your content is not scripted.

So why can't PvE be more like PvP? Because that would require encounters to be unscripted, and if you take unscripted encounters with the mechanics vomit that the dev team enjoys right now together, you get encounters that can occasionally spit out unsolvable mechanics, which runs counter to the end objective of letting the player win. If you then restrict the randomness so it doesn't cause unsolvable mechanics to happen, you run the risk of creating a solvable script once again.

What some of us have been asking for though, is a return of player interaction in PvE. This makes PvE encounters more random because of the players you match with, without messing too much with the scripts they enjoy writing.

[Aidorouge]

Because people aren’t advocating for pushing up the floors of jobs (which is ironically why old BLM is a BAD example) they are advocating for pushing up the ceilings so every job is accessible but has multiple layers of complexity that you can interact with if you want to but don’t have to (don’t hit me with the “if you can interact with someone you have to, 14 has never had that sort of community enforcement)

Jobs shouldn’t top out at “WHM tops out at dungeon difficulty, SCH tops out at ultimate difficulty”, they should all have avenues of being more complex if you want to engage with the complexity to do more for the party

You should be allowed to be challenged by your job in casual content; not be forced to do hardcore content (which I did and don’t do anymore because I don’t enjoy its modern design) just to not fall asleep at the wheel and if you are currently challenged by WHM in a dungeon then the floor shouldn’t be changed

That only works until the complexity becomes "mandatory" though, especially in a game where the community constantly dogs on each other to rushrushrush and min-max or catch flak. We already have people that complain about the likes of Freecure fishing, ice mages, ignoring DoTs, not hitting postionals, etc. Those are already existing examples of "you can interact with XYZ job mechanic if you want to but don’t have to" and it drives people up the wall to see anybody "doing it wrong" and where added complexity just increases the number of things people can (and will) get upset about.

It's the same reason I don't believe a talent point system would fly in this game, because BiS would be figured out in a day, and anybody NOT following the community script (as opposed to the developer one) is going to get so much grief for it.

I don't trust the developers to be creative with the ceiling installation, and I don't trust the community to let other people be if they decide to ignore said ceiling.
+++

As someone who is bad at PvE, I find the encounter design to be very puzzling, particularly in DT.

I have over 2 hotbars of buttons. Why? I mostly use W, S and mouse because I'm trying not to die. I imagine those of you who are good at PvE use more buttons in a set sequence, over and over and over again. Is this interesting to you? I like playing piano occasionally, but in that instance the result is a pleasing sound.

With fight design that boils down to "inflict damage, move somewhere to avoid damage/soak/couple/clap like a seal" you don't need all these buttons, particularly when you're struggling to find the good spot on the floor. The fight would be no more nor less interesting if all you had was one damage button along with W, S and mouse.

Contrast this with PvP. I use all my buttons! I am in constant motion. Every encounter is different. Sometimes I use my buttons in a different order because of the nature of the engagement and am correct to do so. I enjoy PvP and am quite good at it.

Why can't PvE be more like PvP?

Amusingly, PVP is a perfect example of the "no do it THIS way or else" mentality a lot of players have given the suffocation of premades dictating how everyone else plays despite the "freedom" the mode offers in skill usage, or how some jobs, or their choice of Role Action at least, are "objectively bad" in a lot of cases and I never felt like I ACTUALLY had a choice on what I should be using every match (Bravery in the case of MCH) or that playing MCH in general made me seem like a pointless contribution.

It's why I don't really enjoy playing PVP myself anymore because it started to feel like a player-controlled script and the DDR is just slightly more randomized on where it lands, but it WILL always appears like clockwork the moment Salted Earth goes up.

[Absurdity]

I don't trust the developers to be creative with the ceiling installation, and I don't trust the community to let other people be if they decide to ignore said ceiling.
+++

Except we've already had this situation.
We wouldn't be comparing the current state of job design with the past if there wasn't a point in time where jobs were more engaging and arguably more complex.

And if we take Stormblood for example, while the player numbers weren't yet as huge as Shadowbringers (although we're on a trajectory back to those numbers), the game wasn't on fire.
We didn't have elitists flaming people in alliance raids for not playing optimally.
Because nobody actually cared how bad you played your job in casual content.

And it's not like those players have gone away just because they gradually simplified every single aspect of jobs since Shadowbringers.
They're still here and they still just press 1-2-3.
I'd even go ahead and say that it's more frustrating to see people like that now, exactly because jobs are so fool proof that seeing a Cure 1 mage or a filler-combo spammer means they're not even trying to follow what the game tells them with giant glowing buttons.
But just like back then, nobody actually cares in content where you can't really fail.

[Mawlzy]

So why can't PvE be more like PvP? Because that would require encounters to be unscripted, and if you take unscripted encounters with the mechanics vomit that the dev team enjoys right now together, you get encounters that can occasionally spit out unsolvable mechanics, which runs counter to the end objective of letting the player win. If you then restrict the randomness so it doesn't cause unsolvable mechanics to happen, you run the risk of creating a solvable script once again.

Isn't there a middle ground where there is a baseline "script," but the ability of players to interact with the boss beyond chip damage impacts how the fight plays out?

Like tanking in many of the new boss fights seems unnecessarily limited. Point the boss north. Okay. Oh look it's now jumping across the stage! And things from beyond the arena are throwing rocks at me.

There's no reason in principle why we could not stun, silence, interrupt, heavy, knock back, blind, bind, poison, yeet... the boss. Similarly for anything appearing at the side of the arena. Strikes me as far more interesting and would justify having 30 buttons.

[Aidorouge]

Except we've already had this situation.
We wouldn't be comparing the current state of job design with the past if there wasn't a point in time where jobs were more engaging and arguably more complex.

And if we take Stormblood for example, while the player numbers weren't yet as huge as Shadowbringers (although we're on a trajectory back to those numbers), the game wasn't on fire.
We didn't have elitists flaming people in alliance raids for not playing optimally.
Because nobody actually cared how bad you played your job in casual content.

And it's not like those players have gone away just because they gradually simplified every single aspect of jobs since Shadowbringers.
They're still here and they still just press 1-2-3.
I'd even go ahead and say that it's more frustrating to see people like that now, exactly because jobs are so fool proof that seeing a Cure 1 mage or a filler-combo spammer means they're not even trying to follow what the game tells them with giant glowing buttons.
But just like back then, nobody actually cares in content where you can't really fail.

I wasn't playing back then though (I joined mid/late-Endwalker), but that goes back to what I said about one person's complexity being another person's contempt. I enjoy playing current MCH, but I would have hated playing the one that had to juggle ammo, command pets, worry about TP dispensing, and all the other stuff expected of them at launch of Heavensward. If current MCH was like past MCH, I would not be a MCH main right now, hell I'm not sure I would be playing any melee at all if I had to deal with the TP system from back then.

That doesn't mean I'm perfectly fine with all the job changes that have happened since I joined though, as I'm equally baffled by what they've done to say, MNK and BLM so far, I can't understand why they leave healers the way that they do, or how while I don't get the outcry over VPR's Gnoxious Gnash, I also don't see why they can't just have it back because it made no difference to me. But that's been my sentiment in general, that for jobs I don't play, I don't see why they should be changed if the people who main them already liked them as they are, and of course I don't want my own favorite jobs being screwed with either. We lost the other Nostrand... why exactly? And what they did to DRG, DRK, and GNB's gap closers, what the hell.

Going back to MCH again even, there's a lot of people that want it to stop being a "selfish" DPS and be turned into a buffbot like BRD and DNC, but there's a reason I don't play those jobs (and downright hate BRD). Well shucks, which MCH mains does Square-Enix cater to then when it comes to changing the job? Because somebody is SOL no matter what they do.

And I'd beg to differ that people "don't care in normal". That elitist jerkwad with a parse-stick up their bum didn't just magically stop acting that way because they're not in a Savage anymore, and I wouldn't trust the people that were running tankbusters into randoms during Forked Tower to not engage in equally crappy behavior in every mode they play in. My experience alone with trying to do the Ivalice raids for the first time had me running into people that did in fact:

Get mad and vote kick when I failed too many mechanics.
Get mad and vote kick when I died too much.
Get mad and vote kick when I watched cutscenes.

I suppose one COULD argue it was my "own fault" for trying to do them during a mogtome event when people wanted to farm them as efficiently and painlessly as possible, but by the time I finally finished the whole thing I just ended up swearing off ever doing a synced alliance raid again (and I don't even see the point in unlocking the ones in Shadowbringers and beyond), and I haven't touched the alliance raid roulette in months out of fear I'll end up in Ivalice again and ruin someone else's day.

Stormblood content as a whole was a struggle for me to get through though (had never failed a MSQ solo duty until that expansion even), and that's with jobs being as "simple" as they are right now, so I don't get much personal appeal of making them spin more plates because it's not like it'll make the content easier or more enjoyable for me to do, it'll just mean I'll end up with less jobs for me to play. (And I'm already only playing 6-7 of them comfortably in some way.)

[Raikai]

Going back to MCH again even, there's a lot of people that want it to stop being a "selfish" DPS and be turned into a buffbot like BRD and DNC, but there's a reason I don't play those jobs (and downright hate BRD). Well shucks, which MCH mains does Square-Enix cater to then when it comes to changing the job? Because somebody is SOL no matter what they do.

People want that because there's no way to balance MCH in the Phys Ranged group without overhauling it as a whole.

If you leave MCH as a selfish dps trying to do some semblance of rDPS parity with BRD and DNC, both of them will still blow MCH out of the water because how better stats (and good players) scale with the buffing support.

If you buff MCH's selfish dps to be on par with the upper tier of rDPS rankings (above Ninja), then suddenly BRD and DNC are severely outclassed in the Phys Ranged slot.

For the latter option to work they need to actually overhaul the role/slots that the aiming jobs have in PVE, which honestly it would be for the better. I think it's the most problematic role atm (with healers), if it was not for that % party composition buff, I bet we wouldn't see a lot of BRD/DNC/MCHs on static groups.

[Valence]

I mean, I love ya Valence, but I've seen the things you want to do with MCH and most of it doesn't appeal to me as someone who just wants to pew-pew things, and would rather all that stuff got dumped on BRD instead because I don't play it anyway, lol.

And then of course there's the old nugget of "if one job gets to be hard and another job stays easy, which one gets to be which"? Again I point to healers where a lot of WHM mains DON'T want to be the "derpy one" while SCH, AST, SGE get all the fun new stuff. Nor would I want NIN or RDM to become the "hard" melee DPS and caster thus forcing me to pick up different ones because I can't manage their hypothetical new complexity, but I also know full-well there's people who don't want them becoming any easier than they are because then THEY are out of a job.

So who gets catered to and who gets sent to the unemployment line? And what happens if there's not enough jobs left for someone to enjoy despite there being "so many"? What did all the BLM mains change to when what they wanted doesn't exist in another job for example?

Sure I guess, but as a veteran that got robbed of the job I loved above everything else, I claim precedence. Sorry.

Not like we can't design accessible jobs with an optional higher depth and intricacies, but if you're unable to accept playing a job not to its fullest, then yes, it's gonna suck either way, because at some point I'm starting to suspect that a lot of players asking for "chiller" or "simpler" jobs to play are actually unable to accept the idea of not playing one at 100% in reality.

To go back to an example I find pretty striking in what we had in HW/SB tanking in particular: tank stances were mostly a defensive tool that helped just a little with aggro (you gained 20% mitigation which is what modern tank mastery does automatically, lost 20% damage output, and gained +70% aggro generation, which probably went down to 40-50% after the loss in damage), but most players in casual modes tanked in tank stance, in dungeons, everywhere, like they do today, and yet, good players and tryhards would go stanceless. Most people used tank stance because it was safe, and because it was easier, and yet they played sub-optimally.

HW DRK also added another layer of optional complexity over it: Darkside was a stance that made MP being drained constantly and disabled external MP support to gain +20% on damage. It was optimal to play the job with it, and yet half of the casual playerbase if not more didn't turn Darkside on because it was a layer of complexity they didn't want to deal with. Those DRKs were everywhere in casual content, and just on Grit they could do their tank job perfectly fine.

I think the main difference is that the objective set out by the developers in PvE content is for you to (eventually) win, while that's not the case in PvP.

Because of that, PvE encounters are set to follow a strict script that the players can solve and get their win after, contrasting with that, you cannot "solve" PvP because it involves multiple unpredictable people in the field at once. So PvE encounters are only an interaction between your job kit and the script that the boss follows, whether your buttons are useful or not depends on the script, that's why PvE feels like you can clear it just fine with just movement keys and one attack button. On the other side, PvP can actually give you just 5 buttons and be very engaging because your content is not scripted.

So why can't PvE be more like PvP? Because that would require encounters to be unscripted, and if you take unscripted encounters with the mechanics vomit that the dev team enjoys right now together, you get encounters that can occasionally spit out unsolvable mechanics, which runs counter to the end objective of letting the player win. If you then restrict the randomness so it doesn't cause unsolvable mechanics to happen, you run the risk of creating a solvable script once again.

What some of us have been asking for though, is a return of player interaction in PvE. This makes PvE encounters more random because of the players you match with, without messing too much with the scripts they enjoy writing.

Remove mechanic vomit, bring back the Renauds. With more rng.